Old Friends, Good Friends

Two of us, Margarita-happily quite willing simply to divide the bill by 13 and be done with it,  are down toward one end of the long table, heads bent together, cackling as we do our old lady imitation of restaurant customers who want to divide a bill evenly.

"Look, dearie, I didn't have a Margarita."

"But you had coffee!  Two cups!"

"Well, yes, yes, I did.  But you had chocolate cake!  I think that's a good 75 cents more!"

Meanwhile, down at the other end, other friends are actually doing the division.  It appears that they miss entirely the humor of our little skit. They look up and announce that, for those who actually ate a meal, the tab is $33.44.

Back at our end, three women roll their eyes and toss twenties toward the empty dishes.

It's a Mexican restaurant good-bye dinner for one of us, one of my oldest friends, whom I met on the first day of law school 29 years ago.  Neither of us practices law anymore.  Our same age children are grown and gone.  She has just gone through a seriously difficult series of life changes and is off to a new life on the west coast.

The rest of us will still be here, silently wondering:  Would I leave?  Would I leave my friends?  For a job?  For a man?  For a change of scenery?  Who knows?  Most of us are finding that the fifties are a decade of unexpected youthfulness, energy, and willingness to take risks and make changes.

In the meantime, we just love each other.  We have been together for close to two decades and we know how lucky we are.  We have seen each other through unexpected successes and unimagined traumas of raising children.  Divorces.  New jobs.  Job losses.  Deaths of, at last count, I think, 11 parents.  The oldest children have children of their own.  The youngest has made it to high school.  We have children on  both coasts, and one in Africa at the moment. 

I'm guessing that some of us will live to be very old ladies, and we will probably move in together.  Separate bedrooms and a communal kitchen.  And, as we discovered tonight, we are going to have to explore this financial thing a little more carefully.  Some of us throw twenties into the pot because life is too short to spend doing long division, and some of us do the division because life is too long to throw money away.

That's all right.  We have each other and, if we are lucky, we will live long enough to find even more to bicker over.